r/memrise

Hello!

I am Alexis, a developer at Memrise and also an enthusiastic language learner and Memrise user.

Recently, I have worked on implementing the back-end for community wordlists, the feature where you can create your own courses and your own words (available only on the new experience) as well as bringing back 100+ languages from the old site to the new ones, like Cantonese or Latin (also only available in the new experience, check Ben’s recent message to see how to get upgraded to the latest version).

I have started to use Memrise in 2013 and I loved all the features of early Memrise, and the sense of community we had back then. I’d love to have more of that in the current product!

Recently, I became the engineer in charge of the Web for Memrise. The first thing I would like to work on: bringing back the mems, because I am very fond of this feature, having created many mems myself over the years, and I was amongst the many Memrise employees who were disappointed when the decision was taken to remove mems.

For those who never got the chance to see mems from the early times of Memrise: they are mnemonic devices, like a text or a picture, usually funny, to help you remember something. An example of a mem might be:

"τρικυμία (storm) is τρι (3) + κυμία (wave), so the Greeks literally say '3 waves' to say storm!”

This wikipedia page explains the Memrise mems also.

Mems were taken down at the time partly because many users were irresponsible, and would use mems to advertise websites or pass messages unrelated to the learning. I'm hoping this time the voting system and reporting system, along with a filtering system, should fix this issue.

The sad news: all the lovely mems that existed at the time are completely deleted, there is no way to restore those. I'm sorry!

With this post, I just want to test the waters here and see what you think of this.

The idea is basically to bring back mems in the same format as before, more or less. We accept images and text. There will be a system to upvote/downvote mems created by others, to allow the more useful ones to rise to the top. Maybe AI-generation of images. Also, a reporting system so that offensive mems are taken down. You can also choose to keep your mem private, if it's relevant to you but wouldn't be useful to the rest of the community.

Please let me know your thoughts and ideas!

How does it work, what are the most important things, and the most important for me, how is it compared to Duolingo. I've got a streak on Duolingo for 2+ years and I'm always using Duolingo, it's very simple to use.

i saw this as an option as a course a little bit ago, but i was unable to add it due to an error. at the time, i skimmed this subreddit and saw similar problems with other languages like this, although some individuals would be able to access it.

when would this option come back, and would it be functional? (interested specifically with bulgarian and estonian, perhaps georgian.)

(i think i saw that these courses were added back, but i dont see them after updating the app)